ABSTRACT
The modern-day, comparative and historical study of religion has taken several twists and turns since its origins in the late 19th century. In the last three decades in particular, mainly in response to trends in cognate disciplines, there has been a series of transformative ‘turns’, such as a literary turn (applying literary theory to studies of religion), a feminist turn (paying more attention to gender issues), a spatial turn (factoring in spatial theories), a material turn (studying material culture), a visual turn (studying visual practices), a performative turn (new attention to ritual theory), a corporeal turn (incorporating bodily religious ideas and practices), a cognitive turn (applying new developments in cognitive studies), and a sensory or sensorial turn (studying the interplay of religion and the senses). Despite the signifi cance of sound and hearing in our lives, and the emergence of an exciting, multi-and interdisciplinary body of scholarship on acoustics and audition, an auditory or acoustic turn in our fi eld is only now taking shape.
